“Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty,” said David Martin, Nielsen Online’s vice president for primary research.<\/p>\n
Martin, in a post on the company blog, said that more than 60% of Twitter users fail to return the following month.<\/p>\n
“Or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40%,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Let there be no doubt: Twitter has grown exponentially in the past few months with no small thanks to celebrity exposure,” he said in a reference to new users such as US talk show host Oprah Winfrey and promoters such as actor Ashton Kutcher.<\/p>\n
“People are signing up in droves, and Twitter’s unique audience is up over 100% in March,” Martin said.<\/p>\n
“But despite the hockey-stick growth chart, Twitter faces an uphill battle in making sure these flocks of new users are enticed to return to the nest,” he said.<\/p>\n
“A retention rate of 40% will limit a site’s growth to about a 10% reach figure,” he said in a reference to the number of potential users.<\/p>\n
Martin said that when Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter their retention rates were twice as high and they now have retention rates of nearly 70%.<\/p>\n
Martin did say that Twitter’s current 40 percent retention rate was better than the 30% it enjoyed pre-Oprah.<\/p>\n